This blog documents the travels, projects, shows and impressions of a radical poet who wanders around this doomed planet in a search for intelligent life.

Friday, November 11, 2016

Editorial: Don't Panic! Solidarity Is The Key To Survival!

By Der Kosmonaut
It's understandable the anger, disappointment, disgust, fear and revulsion that hundreds of millions around the world are feeling in the wake of the biggest political catastrophe in world history since Adolf Hitler was appointed Reichskanzler in 1933. These feelings are justified. With that said, we can't panic. We can't give in to despair. We are not alone! The forces of reaction are at their peak but we must remember that it reveals the not only the weakness but most importantly the death rattle of totalitarian capitalism. We have reached the crossroads of human history. We are not powerless. We need to unify and support each other. Solidarity is key if we are to survive as a species.
The election of Donald Trump is the final alarm. Neither capitalism nor liberal democracy has anything more to offer us. We can't react as fans of a sports team that fails the win the champion with the attitude, wait til next year. Or in the case of the US, wait for 2-4 years for the next election cycles. The biggest political lesson of the Barack Obama era is that no politician or political party is going to save us. We have been pushed to the abyss but we haven't fall in quite yet. The only option is to organize and fight. We cannot be afraid. We must not only fight politically but we are going to have to get physical. The capitalists, fascists and motley crew of their reactionary supporters must be physically liquidated. As the band Ministry sampled: "We're going to rip this motherfucker off. We're going to tear this motherfucker down." This must be our attitude and approach to Donald Trump and totalitarian capitalism. Either they must perish or we will perish. There's no other way. We can't ask, beg, plead or negotiate with Trump and the capitalists. We can't accommodate or make a deal with them. We can't co-exist anymore with them. The battle lines have been drawn. This is our last chance to exterminate capitalism once and for all. If we do not even try, capitalism will exterminate the planet. The choice is very simple: Is the planet going to survive or will it perish? This isn't a rhetorical question. It is the choice thrust against us.

Are we going to let a minority of ignorant morons, know nothings and capitalistically degenerated idiots dictate to us. Are we going to let the likes of Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and Trump boss us around? Or are we going to come together to organize and craft a battle plan to wage war against them? Make no mistake, this is war. As I write this Trump and his minions are planning a war of extermination against us. Are we, the cultural and intellectual vanguard, going to meekly submit to these idiots that have a collective IQ of under 100? Do we have any self respect and dignity?
Come out of hiding! There's no place to hide. Neither New Zealand nor the Nova Scotian bush is going to save us from capitalist extinction. We must stop being afraid of each other. It's time to put down the smartphones, take the earphones out of our ears, get off Facebook or start engaging with each other. Don't be afraid to have arguments and disagreements with one another. Remember that we are allies and comrades. We can have rhetorical debates about the merits and demerits of anarchism, Marxism, feminism, animal rights, etc. We must desist from breaking up friendships and acquaintances over disagreements of the Spanish Civil War, Trotsky, Stalin, etc. We must stop from insisting that everyone has a uniform political and social outlook. We can have these debates after we hang Trump, Merkel, Hollande, Bill Gates, et al and have dispatched capitalism to the dustbin of history. If we focused the same level of intensity and animosity that we have for each other against totalitarian capitalism,we would prevail in a matter of months.
Don't be afraid of death. We are in the ultimate existential fight. We must kill capitalism and the capitalists. They are planning to kill us. Apart from the biological certainty that every living creature must eventually die, we are faced with absolute certainty that capitalism will lead to our deaths. We can't have pacifism under capitalism. Every single social, political and economic rights we obtained and will lose came as the result of people dying. To hell with Jesus died for you! Countless millions have died for us over history so that we can have liberty. Pacifism is one of the main ideological pillars sustaining capitalism. Contrary to popular opinion, India didn't achieve its independence from Britain because of Ghandi's pacifism. India gained it independence from the tens of millions of lives lost fighting fascism in Europe and Asia as well as the insurrection of 1947. Black Americans didn't gain basic democratic rights thanks to the peaceful protests of Dr. King. That was the results of activists being killed and most importantly the great insurrections in which city after city were razed to the ground. The best perspective on this position is Malcolm X's "Ballot or Bullet" speech.
The most important thing is that we come together not only politically but socially. Each one of us is lonely. We are arguably the loneliest generation in human history. Loneliness is the greatest killer today. Behind the statistics of death by suicide, alcohol, drugs, heart disease and cancer lies the real culprit which is loneliness. People commit suicide, consume alcohol and narcotics because they're lonely. Westerners overeat because they're lonely. In North America, people like going to McDonald's to eat a Big Mac because it's one of the few things that makes them happy. In Montreal, the topic of McDonald's is a conversation icebreaker. Due to the esthetic design of McDonald's restaurants and the high content of sugar in the food, people feel "happy" after consuming a McBurger with Coca-Cola. Along with tobacco, the over consumption of food is the leading cause of cancer. Because people are lonely they obtain more fulfillment in eating. As Elias Canetti pointed out in his work Crowds and Power, we are supposed to dine socially. That's why dinner tables are shaped the way they are. We are designed to look at each other when we eat. Most Westerners dine alone even those that are in families. In the typical North American household, food is "cooked" in microwave ovens within minutes and people then set their plates in front of the TV or desktop.This is the thing: Loneliness is not only the biggest killer today but it's the lynchpin of totalitarian capitalist domination. This is why it's essential to go out and socially interact with people. Even if quarrels break out and feelings are hurt, we must keep the physical lines of communication open. This is doubly so for the artists and intellectuals. When we do interact socially, we do so within narrow social circles and cliques. Everyone does but artists and intellectuals are in many ways the most disconnected from the social reality of the majority. It's tedious as hell to socially interact with those that love McDonald's; with those that eagerly anticipate the next episode of a reality TV show; with those that know more about the Kardashians than about the members of the government cabinet. We have no choice. We have to reach out to these people. We have to stop being so damned judgemental. Indeed, our arrogance and distance has allowed charlatans such as Trump and H.C. Strache to fill in the creative intellectual void. None of us have ever watched more than one episode of The Apprentice. It's trash but the people that we desperately need to overthrow capitalism watch it. I can speak personally on this topic from my recent travels in the Canadian Maritimes. In Moncton, I was forced to interact with people who normally I would avoid like the plague. They were illiterate or semi literate, uneducated redneck hicks. They listened to Country music or if they were a bit more sophisticated, Lady Gaga. Yet not only were they the friendliest and most generous people in North America but they were also more politically aware than I would've ever given them credit for. Yes they were racist and had reactionary social politics. Yet in the last month that I spent in Moncton, the vast majority of them were well aware that Global War is at our doorstep. In that regard, they were far more advanced in their political awareness than most of the artists and intellectuals that I know in Montreal. Many would poh-poh the notion that we're on the brink of Global War. Yet the uneducated rednecks in Moncton are ahead of the curve.
In conclusion, we have crossed the Rubicon. We have to act quickly. We need to organize as fast as possible. We really don't have much time. Yet we can't rush things. As a brilliant friend of mine from London put it in 1993: "If you storm the Bastille two weeks early, who gives a fuck!" We lost more than 15 years of reaching out to the masses. We have to make up for lost time quickly but it will take time and tremendous hard work. We can't simply tell people from the start to stop drinking Coca-Cola and get off Facebook. Hell I've been trying to convince, without success, most of the artists and intellectuals whom I personally know to cancel their Facebook accounts.The creative and intellectual vanguard are just as trapped within the spiritual orbit of capitalism consumed with Facebook and Games of Thrones as those that watch Dancing With the Stars. Not only must we break out of the spiritual orbit of capitalism but we are obliged to do so. This hit home personally in the past month. My best friend pointed out how I wrote a horrible misogynist line in a previous post. I wasn't even aware of it until she called me on it. I realized that I have much a long way still to go in my personal and social development. I too am capitalistically degenerated. The tasks ahead of us are formidable. In order destroy capitalism, we must build solidarity, as well as work on our personal and interpersonal deficiencies. We can't do it alone. Solidarity is key.
Montreal, Quebec Canada
10 November 2016